Topic: SILENTARMY v5: Zcash miner, 115 sol/s on R9 Nano, 70 sol/s on GTX 1070 - page 37. (Read 209309 times)

Looks like I won't be testing silentarmy tweaks tomorrow.  I upgraded a rig to Ubuntu 16.04 and installed the amdgpu-pro drivers (16.40-348864).  It took me a while to figure out I had to remove fglrx-config in order to remove the amdgpu-pro module blacklist.  Now Xorg is running 100%, and it (or something else) is spewing tons of "Failed to send Message" to kern.log.  Probably should've setup a separate test rig with a fresh Ubuntu install...

True about needing to do proper workload for profit, but by your calculations, 1070 is 22% more profit per day, which is good until you factor in you can get a 480 for $200 on a good sale, and it is hard to find a 1070 much below $400.  480 per day has been between ~0.0030 BTC and ~0.0042, so it is best for mining right now.

Thanks!

Like Quint said, nVidia is way better at F@H than AMD. A GTX 1070 can get at least 600K PPD while folding, which equates to about 25 CURE and 2250 FLDC per day...which in turn equates to about 0.0038BTC per day for a single 1070 at current prices. Looking at whattomine.com I am seeing that for 150 Sol/s (about what a 480 or 290 can do) you net the equivalent of 0.003 - 0.0032 BTC per day. So nVidia has things it is better at and can be more profitable. You just need to mine (or fold for) a coin that is more suited to the hardware. It's not the devs' fault that most algos are better suited to AMD.

This is pretty perfect explanation of why Nvidia has bad ROI mining in general.  However, GPGPU work in general can depend heavily on architecture, so while Nvidia is generally more efficient per watt, there are a lot of things better suited for GCN.  And correction on SHA256, it uses pretty much 0 memory, that is why it so ridiculously easy to make ASICs, which are about 2,000x more efficient than GPUs.  Scrypt is somewhat resistant, due to using a lot more memory, but it isn't necessarily memory hard, so it still can be sped up a lot (I think about 100x?  I forget my calculations).

I know of at least 100 rigs out there that would jump to a dev fee miner if it was comparable to the amd miners. A little development and it'd go further. There are a lot of us that have nvidia. There's a lot of money in the smaller altcoins when they pop up, and the versatility of the 1070s is why i chose them over the 480. I dont care about initial cost. Anyway, if someone wants to start developing one, there are people that could fund a dev fee % miner.

The reason there is so much AMD development, is there are a lot more miners with AMD cards.  They have historically been best investment mining wise.  They were better with Bitcoin and Litecoin, (which are both heavily compute limited), because they supported certain key operations in hardware.  AMD tends to have better price/performance anyway, even for gaming.  The newer algorithms are memory hard on purpose, to be heavily ASIC resistant, there are ASICs for most non memory hard algorithms.  Sure a 1070 has more compute than a 480, but it costs 2X as much, so it is kinda silly to buy for mining, when you can get same/faster speed for half the cost.  The 1060 3GB is decent choice for Ethereum, but 470 is still a lot better cost/perf.  

If you are a developer, you are heavily incentivised to make AMD miner, since they are the vast majority, cheaper hardware, better OpenCL programming (Nvidia users insist on CUDA ports, because Nvidia refuses to properly support OpenCL).  Nvidia doesn't support OpenCL 1 very well, and OpenCL 2 support is nowhere in sight, even though AMD cards from 4 years ago support it.  So blame Nvidia for trying to make everything proprietary, and laughing at any open effort.  In a better world, Nvidia miners wouldn't need dedicated CUDA ports to run fast. Nvidia mocks anything being open, AMD whole hardheartedly embraces it, so it is odd you want more FOSS effort from products of the company that despises it..... Even so, with an optimized 1070 CUDA kernel, 480 is going to be better cost/perf, so you aren't really helping out miners that much. Current SA is far from perfect optimization, but 470 still beats 1070, because EquiHash is heavily memory limited, just like Ethereum (which has optimized Nvidia miners).

and another to mrb's address http://zcash.flypool.org/miners/t1cVviFvgJinQ4w3C2m2CfRxgP5DnHYaoFC

I'm donating and more are then you think, the funny part, how, I'm donating I'm using CM's miner and paying the 2.5 % fee and donating with one of my miners using his miner a few hours a day. how it that communism stupidity maybe to some but not communism.

Very good explanation! i have never thought about it, i use 100% nvidia because of power efficiency, afaik even at the lowest production point gtx 1070 cannot be match in power efficiency, something i have to monitor very closely because of power costs in my region.
so in short... we (nv owners) are fucked!

The RX 480 is a tossup with the GTX 1070 on memory access - which is why they're comparable at best in performance on algorythms like the ones ZEC and ETH use despite the GTX 1070 cost being almost twice as much.

 On most compute-bound stuff like Folding@Home, the GTX 1070 blows the RX 480 completely out of the water on raw performance, and is slightly superior on a PPD/$ basis while being much superior on a PPD/watt basis.

 The ONLY compute-bound project I am aware of that the RX 480 is competative with the GTX 1070 on raw performance is the Distributed.Net RC5-72 project - but on that project the R9 290 (for an example I've specifically worked with) blows BOTH of the other cards mentioned completely out of the water on raw keys/sec rate and on keys/sec per $, and is very competitive on a keys/sec per watt basis despite being 3 generations (appx) older.
 The HD 7870 at FOUR generations older and down a few steps on the "high end" level from the R9 290 can almost match the raw performance of the RX480 and GTX 1070 while arguing very well on keys/sec per watt and blowing both away VERY hard on current pricing.

 RC5-72 however only uses a very small part of the GPU specifically including ZERO floating point, and is small enough to fit in CACHE ram when it's run on anything semi-recent of a CPU, and does very little memory access at all. The closest thing in Cryptocoin mining to it is SHA256 (Bitcoin), and even that's not a good comparison 'cause SHA256 uses more memory.


 Nvidia gets the "scraps" on mining because most mining algorythms don't use most of the parts of a NVidia card that makes it competative with AMD cards on general or compute-bound usage at a given price point, and as a result few folks use NVidia cards to mine on which makes them a much lower priority for development.


 It's not "lack of development" ALONE that keeps Nvidia uncompetative on a hash/$ basis for ETH and ZEC (and derivatives using the same algorythms).
 It's the inherent design of the ALGORYTHMS that keep NVidia uncompetative on a hash/$ basis coupled with the higher PRICE of their cards that have competative memory access even when development IS mature.

You need to build, use make command in linux.

Yeah, not sure why you guys think the 480 is the equivalent of a 1070. It is right now due to a lack of development effort for Nvidia. Out of the five major releases I've seen for Equihash, they've all been tailored for AMD.

There is money to be had in Nvidia, there are definitely a lot of people that invested in the hardware and have it available, myself included. There is no software available to take advantage of it though and the only comparable point people have been using is Ethereum... which is just limited by latency and bus width. Most of the big coins right now are based on Dagger (so memory bus limited), this has lead to a artificial inflation and perception in AMD mining.

Sadly, there is almost no one interested in making a good miner for Nvidia. CUDA or OCL, Nvidia miners just get the scraps left over as a side though, such as SA v5. While Nvidia support is there, it's definitely not the forefront of development efforts right now.


The whole open source vs closed source thing I don't get. Developers should be rewarded for their work, this is coming from a miner. A dev fee not only incentivizes current development, but future development too... instead of just being a side project that someone will throw out when they get bored - it shows too. Take Claymore, he's doing it as a full time job. It's no wonder that he puts a lot of effort into it. While MKB is doing a pretty good job, it's obvious that this isn't his job. He has a different job he goes off to do every day and this is more then likely a hobby.

That's the problem with open source development. It's a hobby. It's not a job, unless you can fund a non-profit that essentially turns this into a job or a CO-OP, such as a community open source miner that has a dev fee people use (which I've suggested multiple times over the years), it's going to stay that way. A lot of miners do this for a JOB as such we need professional software written by people who also are employed doing what we do. Miners can't depend on software from hobbyists. I don't mean that in a bad way, just the priorities are completely different.

For instance, Nvidia miners had absolutely no support when a bleeding edge algo came out. This wasn't supposed to be only a AMD payday, this was also a Nvidia payday. I can't even fucking throw money at someone or somewhere to get something done. I'm not a huge miner, but I have quite a bit invested here. Do you know what sort of predicament that makes for someone who is running a business?

I would happily run a 2.5% dev fee miner if it gets things done. I would've even ran that 15% AMD miner if it gave me the same rates, but it doesn't. I still have to go back to Ethereum. That is unacceptable. I'm not the only one running Nvidia hardware too. There are three big name miners for Equihash right now, Silent Army, Claymore, and Optiminer. They're all competing with eachother... and they're all throwing away Nvidia miners like they don't even fucking matter.

Why? There are quite a few Nvidia miners, they do exist... They're either mining Lbry right now or more then likely Ethereum if they're smart.

if I change values in param.h do I have to do something for it to take effect or just relaunch the program??

we are at offtopic here, but get you line straight, NV is better or same at compute, the only problem that ppl atm mine memory limited coins as ethereum and prolly zcash (we still don`t know full scope of GPU and memory usage because optimization is still far behind full optimization)
just look at lbry for instance or any other algo that is GPU limited, shame most were never profitable and their optimization is bad on both opencl and cuda, but situation is clear that Nvidia is better with GPU coins, expecially if you include power

and sure here I talk about 10xx range of cards, where nvidia have a clear lead, shame that they used less width memory interface of AMD would be dead shit of the card!

i set one rig to your address http://zcash.flypool.org/miners/t1MaD62DS2bbzxCuZHnkB8g5Yc2wbeT1g9z

ofcourse there are no binary exe in the repo, go to release tab : https://github.com/zawawawa/silentarmy/releases

piece of ***t  
did you read that
1 - setx not set
2 - there is no silentarmy.exe in the repo
epic fail!  

wtf dude, 1070 are not an equal match for RX480 its for RX490
compare with same price range, if you want to go with 1070 compare it with 2x RX480, you don't know what you talk about...

i've been on gpu mining since bitcoin price was 1$, and i do openCL coding too, and never see any NV card that beat AMD on same price range, either because NV just slow, or their price is a shit. I am a miner, i don't care which one are superior in their performance, what i do care is Efficiency, Cost, and Profit so price matters

LOL you don`t know what you talk about, atm AMD is only better in ethereum because its dependent on memory latency and bandwith which both 1070 and RX 480 share same of 256bit width
where GPU calculation matter NV is at least 10xx series are outperforming AMD, but when ppl only mine ethereum its their only bases for comparation

for instance NV 1070 is faster with blake ago then RX480 and it used in a part of algo for zcash